The customer is always wrong

One of the big differences between retail stores here in Mexico and in the US is their view of customer service. In the US, once you get home if you notice a product is defective or even just not what you really wanted, you return it to the store and get your money back or another product. If you see something advertised on sale and they are out of it, you generally can get a raincheck. If an item has a sign in front of it that says it is on sale and the register doesn’t show the sale price, the cashier corrects it. (I know there are exceptions, but you get the idea.)
Well, shopping here in Puerto Vallarta really demonstrates that you aren’t in Kansas anymore!
We like the bakery at Gigante, and buy chocolate croissants there frequently. One day we got some off the tray and the price card said 3 pesos each. When we took them to be wrapped and priced, they were marked 4 pesos each. Harold told the clerk the sign said 3 pesos. She went and looked at the sign, then moved the tray elsewhere on the shelf. Then she went behind the counter and looked in the big box of price signs and found one that said 4 pesos. She took it over and put it in front of the newly relocated tray, and then proudly pointed at the sign and said, “See they are 4 pesos each.” Yeah, how silly of us to think they were 3 pesos. Of course, now the normal price is 3.5!
When shopping at Soriana we saw signs all around the paint department for Meriadano brand paint 20% off. Well, it actually said “tola pintura”, not toda. We took a can of spray paint, which was directly behind one of the signs, to the register. It was not 20% off. I went back to the paint department to check. Sure enough, the sign was right there in front of the spray paint. I asked the clerk if the spray paint was 20% off, he said no, only the regular cans of paint. I asked then why did the sign say all the paint, he said he didn’t know, but spray paint wasn’t on sale. I went to the service counter and she thought about it for a minute and looked at the spray can and pointed to where it said acrylic. She said it was acrylic, not paint, that’s why it wasn’t on sale. I showed her the sign and my receipt which clearly said “pintura”. Then she tried telling me that the sign said “tola pintura”, which doesn’t mean anything, not “toda pintura” which is all paint. Next, she called the paint department and the same guy that I already spoke to came up to the service counter, so I knew we were doomed.
One day at Walmart we had a similar experience with caulk. I think they would have sold it to us for the sale price, except it did show in very tiny print on the sign, the particular type of caulk (not the one we got!)
I tell this to people who have lived here a while and they give me the look that indicates “rookie” and tell me that I’ll learn to accept that the customer is rarely right. Even if you try to bring something back that is defective, the store attitude is that if it was defective, you shouldn’t have bought it in the first place, so why should they take it back?
We did actually successfully return something once! We bought 3 gallons of paint at Gigante and 2 of them didn’t end up being the color we wanted. One we kept as it didn’t need to match anything. The other was for touch-up so it needed to be correct. We went to the service counter and were told the paint person would be in later, come back in 45 minutes. So we came back in an hour. Still no paint person, so they wanted us to come back later. Luckily for us, one of the timeshare sharks was hanging around near the service counter and he convinced them that we had waited long enough and we didn’t want to come back with our gallon of paint. So they actually gave us a refund!
But for the most part, “buyer beware” really applies here!